Call Kurtis: How’d I Pay $40 Above Face Value For Show Tickets?

She thought she’d surprise her great grandson with tickets to a kids show. But the El Dorado Hills woman was in for a surprise, herself. Kay O’Bryan called Kurtis after learning she could have bought the tickets for much cheaper. She found the tickets at an online resale sites. After she got them in-hand she learned she paid way above face value.

“Colton, he, he’s so cute. He loves dragons,” O’Bryan gushes about her great grandson.

Being the great grandmother she is, O’Bryan gave 4-year-old Colton tickets to “How to Train Your Dragon” for Christmas.

“They said the show was fantastic,” said O’Bryan.

But buying the tickets was not a good experience for her. After an online search, O’Bryan unknowingly ended up on a ticket resale site and paid $64 for each ticket, plus fees and shipping costs.

“We opened them up and I saw, I looked at them. $24.75, I couldn’t believe it,” said O’Bryan.

Yep, a face value of $24.75. O’Bryan overpaid by nearly $40. She tried to cancel the tickets, but the website denied her.

“This is just a really big rip-off,” said O’Bryan.

But, we’re told it’s legal.

“In California there is no scalping law, per se for sellers that sell on the internet,” said the Better Business Bureau’s Gary Almond.

Almond says they get a lot of complaints about second market sellers, but it’s the buyers who need to do a little more research.

“Take a quick look around who the original ticket seller is, what they’re sold for, look at all the terms and conditions and look at the background of the seller,” said Almond.

We found some fine print on the website that O’Bryan missed.

“‘Prices shown on this site are set by the sellers and may be greater than the face value printed on the ticket,'” O’Bryan read on the site, “Who reads that? I didn’t.”

A lot of times people end up on the second market websites after tickets to a show have sold out. It turned out at the time O’Bryan bought tickets, there were still tickets available to “How to Train Your Dragon” at the original seller, Ticketmaster. So O’Bryan could have paid face value.

We asked the website O’Bryan purchased from why they charge so much for tickets. They told us they’re just a marketplace and they don’t set the prices, the third-party sellers do. They also told us they have that disclaimer on every page on the site.